Tag Archives: Asus

Couple of weeks ago my old ASUS ROG G60Vx laptop started showing vertical red lines after booting into the Windows desktop … ok, lets try getting into the BIOS but I could not read anything on the screen … hmm, looks like the graphics chip is going kaputs. Time to look for a replacement video card.

Hunting around I realized that a replacement card is not going to come so cheap. Ok, not really a problem as we have multiple Windows laptops and MacBooks in our household.

I really don’t like disposing of things that could be brought back to life … so today I decided to try the old temp bake job. Typically the cause of graphics card failure is the soldering contacts between the GPU and the PCB. The technique of baking is to re-flow the solder and bond it back together.

I pulled out the PCIe graphics card, and preheated the oven. Solder typically has a melting point of 188C/370F, so I set it to 375F. I wrapped some tin foil to cover the surrounding parts, and also make some legs to elevate it. I placed this on a pizza plate ,that has holes in it, and left it in for 10min … then left it to cool with the door open. I noticed on the web about discussions concerning fumes from the PCB board … since my GPU is on a small board I was not too concerned.

Ok, so the baking is done … clean off the old thermal paste … get rid of some dust … boot up, and hope for the best … BONUS !!! I have a BIOS screen I can read, and no artifacts showing when I booted up into Windows.

Now for all of you others thinking of doing this … this is just a temp job, the soldering will fail again at some point in time … or you can over-heat the board too much and damage other components.